Pawsitively Swindled

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  He sounded a little … wired. Was he hopped up on caffeine?

  “What brought this on?” she asked. “Are you just worried?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Edgar?” she asked, moving toward the couch. “What’s going on?”

  “Don’t panic, but … the last couple weeks—since we started playing Magic Cache, really—Neil’s gotten … louder. And tonight … uhh, this morning … he’s been especially chatty.”

  Now it was Amber’s turn to sigh. “Why didn’t you say anything sooner?”

  “Because you’ve got enough things to worry about. I’ve dealt with Neil for years. This is nothing new.”

  But it was new. Because Edgar had finally started to get some relief from the Penhallow trapped in his head. Edgar had started to venture out into Edgehill more. Heck, the guy had gotten a haircut! At an actual barber shop!

  Amber crossed her legs on the couch cushion, settling against the back. “What’s he been saying?”

  “Once I started thinking about my Magic Cache idea and how we can use it to hide the grimoires, he’s gotten really persistent,” Edgar said. “I think he wants me to help you hide them so then he’ll know the location. I still haven’t worked out if the guy can actually see through my eyes, or if he’s good enough at reading my thoughts now that he can make very informed guesses.”

  “How are we going to avoid him knowing where we stash the books when I need your help?” she asked.

  “Once you’re skilled enough, I’ll send you off on your own to hide them,” he said, voice strained. “If I don’t know where they are, then Neil won’t either.”

  Amber frowned. “We need to get that guy out of your head.”

  “Task for another day,” he said. “So you ready for phase two?”

  She had absolutely no clue what phase two entailed. “Yeah, I don’t have to start working on floats until tomorrow. I’ve got the afternoon shift here though, so I have to be back here at one.”

  “Okay, I’ll come pick you up,” he said. “Bring your personal grimoire, some paper, and any maps you have of the surrounding towns. Oh, and a pen.”

  Chapter 11

  By the time Amber got downstairs, Edgar’s truck was already at the curb. After stepping out into the chilly April morning and locking up, she hopped in her cousin’s shiny new white pickup. The inside was mostly clean, but she crunched a few desiccated french fries underfoot within moments of getting inside. She opted to keep her purse in her lap.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “There’s very little that’s good about it. I’m on hour 29 of no sleep,” he said, then pulled out onto Russian Blue.

  Amber swallowed, staring at the scruffy, worn-out profile of her cousin. “Because of Neil?”

  “Yeah,” he said tightly. “He used to do this … before. Hound me for days on end to find the book, Henbane. Find it, find it, find it. I’d ignore him until I couldn’t anymore. Then I found ways to cope.”

  Getting personal information out of Edgar Henbane was like pulling teeth sometimes, but in this wired, insomniac state he was in, he seemed oddly chatty.

  “Like what?” she asked.

  “Music. It usually drowns him out pretty good. I’ll blast something heavy metal and full of guitar and then I sit on the internet to help keep busy. It’s hard to sleep when you’ve got the volume cranked up to twenty. But without the music, I have a relentless Penhallow screaming at me. So I choose insomnia over total madness.”

  Amber had known he had a tech job which allowed him to work from home, but she didn’t know exactly what it was he did, or how he’d gotten into it in the first place. He hadn’t been a very tech-savvy kid when they were growing up. “Has it always been music?” she asked. “I mean, when this first started happening, was that how you coped then, too?”

  “Some. I gamed for a while—those MMORPG fantasy games, then the military shooting simulation ones. Then I started teaching myself how to code and spent a lot of time on tech-nerd forums and whatnot. It started off as a way to help keep busy, and it seemed like a logical choice since I was online all the time anyway.

  “That’s how I got my job a few years back, actually. I got to chatting with a guy about a particular coding problem he was having, and eventually he was like, ‘What if I just pay you to do this for me?’” Edgar shrugged, keeping his attention focused forward. “I’m kind of the whole tech department at this small company now. Pay’s good and I never have to leave the house.”

  Amber was still frowning slightly at his profile. Partly because she only understood half of what he said—what on earth was an MMORPG?—and partly because with as much as she complained about the loneliness of her own life, Edgar’s had been even more so. And it had all been caused by the actions of her family. No wonder he’d wanted nothing to do with her for so long. But Amber was amazed that Edgar was so casual about being self-taught at something that he’d eventually gotten so good at, jobs had come to him.

  “If you say anything remotely pitying or apologetic, I’m turning this car around,” he said, but there was no bite to his words.

  She smiled to herself. “Wouldn’t dream of it. So where are we going?”

  “Down Korat Road, but in the opposite direction of the Sippin’ Siamese,” Edgar said. “To the abandoned neighborhood on the edge of Belhaven.”

  Amber’s brow furrowed. Not so much because it was an odd choice of location, but because the “neighborhood” was more like a handful of abandoned houses in an area that had become more forest than anything else. It was the kind of place high school kids threw parties, but even that hardly happened anymore—there were plenty of remote spots along Chartreux Creek that held more appeal.

  Korat Road eventually turned into a two-lane highway that led to Belhaven in the south. Most of the businesses on Korat, aside from the bar, had shut down years ago.

  Belhaven had once been a mining town, people traveling up into Oregon from California during the gold rush. The town, like so many others, sprung up when money flooded in, but once the gold had been mined out, the people went with it.

  Between Belhaven and Edgehill and in the northern edges of Belhaven, one could find abandoned houses and businesses, overgrown with vegetation. Ghost town tours had become a robust income source for Belhaven, so Amber supposed things always had a way of working out.

  But that didn’t mean she looked forward to heading into a possibly haunted abandoned neighborhood at seven thirty in the morning on very little sleep along with her cousin who was operating on even less.

  “Remember what Simon told you about Edgehill and the supposed magic veins and all that?” Edgar asked, speaking for the first time in several minutes. “Well, I was doing some research about that the last couple nights since the roommate in my brain won’t stop talking.”

  “You can just … look that stuff up online?”

  “Eh, sorta,” Edgar said. “There’s a corner of the web that’s frequented by witches. It’s like the dark web, but only witches know how to access it—you need a VPN, a Tor browser, and a spell to grant you access.”

  Amber still was only following half of what he said. She hadn’t known her cousin’s nerdy tech side was this extensive.

  Edgar came to a stop at the end of Toyger Road. Instead of making a left on Korat Road toward the Sippin’ Siamese, he made a right. This part of Edgehill was even more untamed than the area Edgar lived in. Grasses grew so tall here that they were almost the same height as some of the trees’ lowest branches. Thorny-looking shrubs grew everywhere, tiny spots of yellow, white, and pink flowers lining the stalks of the thickly growing weeds. Small birds flitted about the branches, and the occasional tiny moth or bee winged among the small offerings of pollen.

  “Anyway, I was doing some research on this magic vein thing. Apparently, something happened in this area roughly fifty years ago. This part of Edgehill doesn’t have the same connection to old mining towns like north Belhaven does,” Edgar said. “I
hit a jackpot of conspiracy theories about it. There’s no real consensus on the time it happened, but fifty years comes up as an estimate most often. There are tons of posts claiming that when a witch gets to Edgehill, her powers are dampened because the ground the town sits on is tainted. There are stories of backfiring spells and glitchy magic. One witch claimed that his girlfriend tried to do a spell to open up a magical vein in the abandoned neighborhood on the Edgehill side—since apparently that was ground zero for The Event—and this vein-opening spell apparently caused the magic to ricochet off the ground. It hit her full in the chest and killed her instantly.”

  Amber didn’t like the sound of any of that. “And you actually want to go to this place why?”

  Edgar was clearly not at all fazed by her tone. “Because mixed into all of this conspiracy stuff? Several people said this abandoned neighborhood has at least one dead zone—though no one has been able to find the thing. I guess people have gotten close, or have seen the signs that one is there, but no one has actually found it in decades.”

  Amber stared at his profile again. Perhaps her cousin had recently been body snatched by aliens and that was why she didn’t understand a stinkin’ word coming out of his unshaven face.

  “Oh boy …” he said, clearly sensing her confusion. “Okay, so, like with everything, Magic Cache has its fringe users. You know how you can be majorly into a show’s fandom—like, say, Vamp World—and think you’re the biggest superfan who has ever lived because you’ve written fifteen fanfics, and then you meet someone who has, like, a full back tattoo of John Huntley’s fanged face or whatever?”

  “How are you this nerdy?” Amber asked. “I wasn’t sure what you did in your spare time, but I didn’t think it was this.”

  Edgar ignored her. “Magic Cache is no exception. Hardcore cachers are always looking for the holy grail of caches: dead zones. Caching is about finding that slight increase in the baseline of ambient magic, right? Well, there are weird pockets all over the globe where magic registers at zero. The amount of ambient magic around it doesn’t matter; magic just doesn’t exist there on its own. So when a cacher finds one of these places, he puts an item and guestbook there like usual, but then often layers something on top of it. Some complicated spell you have to work through or dismantle or whatnot. So not only do you have to find this anomaly to find the dead zone, if a witch has discovered it before you, it could be even harder to find the cache because of whatever complicated barrier the cacher added to the location.”

  Amber had mostly followed that. “Okay … and this helps me with the grimoires how?”

  “A dead zone would be a perfect hiding place for the books. A cloaked item in a dead spot isn’t traceable. The only way to find it would be knowing it was there or if you stumbled on it by accident. And then we could layer it with so many additional spells, no one would ever know where that thing was but you.

  “The other bonus would be making the Henbane book both the cache item and the guestbook. If someone tried to tamper with it—and in this case it would just be opening it, since it’s charmed at the moment to only open for you or Willow—it would immediately be returned to you.”

  Amber reveled in the brilliance of this suggestion for only a moment. “But if all that happens, it means the cloak on the book will have dropped and then the book would be a beacon for Penhallows again.”

  “Well, yes,” Edgar said, wrinkling his nose. “That’s the downside of the plan: if the book is returned to you, that’s your cue to drop everything you’re doing, grab the book, and get the heck out of Dodge because the Penhallows will be hot on your tail.”

  Amber gulped.

  “Just think about it. If you decide it’s too risky, we can think of something else,” he said. “I’m not even suggesting that we use the dead spot in Edgehill. Mostly because it’s too obvious of a hiding place—even if no one has found it in ages. We need a spot in the middle of Death Valley or something. But, until we find a good dead zone, we might as well have you practice finding one.”

  “Practice trying to find something that’s stumped even the most hardcore Magic Cachers? I thought my magical skills were tragic.”

  “Oh, they are,” he said, aiming a grin at her when she offered him her best glare. “But I believe in you, cousin.”

  “Thanks,” she said, suddenly feeling shy. It was so strange to see the glimpses of what Edgar had been when they were growing up—the big sensitive kid who had, over the years, turned into a grumpy recluse. Somehow he was less grumpy when he was sleep deprived. Amber supposed prolonged insomnia could wear down the rough edges of just about anyone.

  They drove for another fifteen minutes before the first of the abandoned houses appeared on the left side of the road. It was a two-story farmhouse with a sagging reddish roof, and windows that were more frame than glass. Weeds grew tall around the house on all sides; vines wrapped around the porch and up the walls, as if they were trying to drag the whole structure back into the earth with them.

  Just after passing the house, Edgar turned left onto an unmarked road. After a minute or two, they passed the remnants of a few more abandoned houses set back from the street. The thin whitish-trunked red alder trees that were so plentiful in the area where Chloe Deidrick had first gone missing were here, but there were taller, fuller trees too—mostly Douglas fir and bigleaf maple.

  The farther in they got, the more this place started doing something to Amber’s magic, but she couldn’t say what. She supposed it could be that this place, as overtaken by nature as it was, had an abundance of ambient magic—ambient magic she’d only recently become more aware of thanks to her Magic Cache sessions. Maybe it was like the time Aunt G had tried to get Amber and Willow into birdwatching. In the months after Amber’s parents’ deaths, Aunt G had clearly been desperate to get Amber and Willow out of the house. For weeks on end, the grieving teenagers had been hauled out of bed in the wee hours to tramp around in the woods, listening for bird calls. It hadn’t stuck as a hobby for either girl, but even now, Amber constantly noticed birds and their individual calls. Most people, Amber figured, didn’t pay much attention to the creatures, but once her aunt opened her eyes and ears to them, Amber heard them everywhere. Was the awareness of ambient magic being all around her like that, too? Was this wild place—one that had potentially been a home to witches—teeming with magic?

  Even after another ten minutes down the dirt road, this “neighborhood” remained more forest than ghost town. And then …

  “Stop,” Amber said suddenly.

  Edgar did so without question, though he pulled over to the shoulder, as if there were any possibility of cars approaching from either direction.

  She got out and walked toward the house she’d seen on the right side of the road. It was the most intact structure she’d seen—even more so than the one they’d passed on the way in. Now outside the car, her magic felt even stranger. Sluggish, almost.

  The house was as sagging and overgrown as the two-story one on the corner, but there was something about this one that spoke to her. She just couldn’t decipher what it was telling her yet.

  Only faint remnants of a driveway to the small cottage remained, weeds having overtaken the laid concrete. Though the small house looked like it was only one-story—and so small it might only have two or three rooms total—the front of the house has been fashioned to resemble the tower of a castle. The cylindrical structure had a round base and a peaked roof, the bottom section had a window in each of its three sides, and the top section had a set of square windows that looked out on the cracked driveway Amber stood on now. A small porch was set back from this structure; a dilapidated, three-legged chair sat on the porch, leaning against the dirt-streaked wall behind it.

  What did this place look like when witches lived here?

  The mere act of asking stirred her magic a bit—a gentle nudge to something that had been dozing. She couldn’t know for sure that this had been a magic-friendly neighborhood, but somethin
g about that felt right, deep in her bones.

  Maybe Amber could ask the house itself what it had looked like. Memory and time were gifts from her mother, she reminded herself again. Perhaps this was another place where she could use those gifts.

  Amber heard a crunch behind her and knew Edgar had gotten out of the car now. She felt him watching her.

  Approaching the house, she walked past the tower-like front room and stopped at the porch, reaching out a hand to wrap it around one of the support poles, which was doing its level best to keep the listing porch roof from tumbling to the ground. The pole was cracked in the middle; it was a small wonder that it was still standing.

  Her magic thrashed from the contact, but not the way it usually did when it was primed for use. This wasn’t thrashing in the crowd at a concert, excited and full of frenetic energy; this was thrashing beneath sheets in the throes of a nightmare.

  Edgar had said “something” happened here fifty years ago. He’d also said that the use of magic here by a witch had caused it to bounce back and kill her.

  Only a little concerned, Amber focused her sluggish magic as best she could, closed her eyes, and asked, What did you look like fifty years ago?

  Her magic gave a shudder. It vibrated down her arm, into her hand, and then pulsed out of her palm. Her skin grew warm where it touched the wood of the old porch. She yelped, too nervous to open her eyes. If her magic was flying back at her to offer a killing blow, she didn’t want to watch it happen.

  Edgar let out a long, slow curse.

  Amber’s eyes popped open at the sound, and then her mouth did too. The wood beneath her palm was no longer a dirt-streaked white, but a clean, pale baby blue. It stood straight and proud with nary a crack or splinter in it. Her gaze tracked up, and she found the porch had been reborn, too. The wooden chair on the porch not only had all four legs now, but it had a table before it topped with a potted plant with big pink flowers.

  Amber gasped and backed away, then hurried to Edgar’s side as he stood open-mouthed before the house, his boots in the middle of a wide, smooth cement driveway.